Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Maicon is a great player, but I have to wonder about these guys...do they have no pride whatsover? Or is soccer morphing into professional wrestling...?Note - that Maicon video has somehow become corrupted since I first posted it, and his indignation about not getting the foul is no longer so clearly visible in the snippet (see for yourself here) Instead, I now offer the even more sensational audacity of Morten Gamst Pedersen;

Friday, June 25, 2010

Clive Thompson in The New York Times about "Watson," a computer that IBM scientists expect will be "the world’s most advanced “question answering” machine, able to understand a question posed in everyday human elocution — “natural language,” as computer scientists call it — and respond with a precise, factual answer. In other words, it must do more than what search engines like Google and Bing do, which is merely point to a document where you might find the answer. (I'm surprised the article makes no reference to the 1957 film Desk Set, where librarian Katherine Hepburn pits her wits against Emerac, Hollywood's 50s version of Watson...and wins) Video.

Sunday, June 20, 2010

Steven Johnson amplifies on his NYT essay regarding Nick Carr's new book The Shallows, and in particular on the charge that "The problem with Mr. Carr’s model is its unquestioned reverence for the slow contemplation of deep reading." Johnson suggests a "crucial flipside to the decline of long-form reading in the digital age: the increase in short-form writing. If we are slightly less able to focus because of the distractions of electric text, I suspect it is more than made up for by the fact that we are much more likely to write out our responses to what we do read." Johnson is surely right in pointing out that "to write out a response to something makes you see it in a new way, often with greater complexity." Writing out responses is usually done with an audience in mind, however, and then other-directed, instrumental, narcissistic (often, especially on the internet!), and qualtitatively different from the mode of intransitive thinking that Birkerts (and Carr?) fear are under attack.

Saturday, June 19, 2010

It has come to light that it was Santeri Ojala, aka StSanders - the Finnish "shreds" guy - who had worked his mischief on Wayne Rooney and the rest of the lads yesterday. That would explain it. My favorite shred of all, however (featured on Knowbodies previously) is the one below. A natural fit, Santana plays the part so briliantly!

ReferenceShelf has done us the favor of summarizing in a list the 2010 top 10 trends in academic libraries, based on a review of the literature by ACRL. More on each trend here in the ACRL News article
1. Academic library collection growth is driven by patron demand and will include new resource types.
2. Budget challenges will continue and libraries will evolve as a result.
3. Changes in higher education will require that librarians possess diverse skill sets.
4. Demands for accountability and assessment will increase. Increasingly, academic libraries are required to demonstrate the value they provide to their clientele and institutions.
5. Digitization of unique library collections will increase and require a larger share of resources.
6. Explosive growth of mobile devices and applications will drive new services.
7. Increased collaboration will expand the role of the library within the institution and beyond.
8. Libraries will continue to lead efforts to develop scholarly communication and intellectual property services.
9. Technology will continue to change services and required skills.
10. The definition of the library will change as physical space is repurposed and virtual space expands.
Source: C&RL News (June, 2010; 71.6)

Thursday, June 17, 2010

Important development at Google docs: (from ReadWriteWeb)Previously, users who wished to share documents with others had to send a formal invitation through email, but now sharing can be as easy as sharing a link. These changes come on the heels of enhanced collaboration features which were recently added to Docs to give it more of a Google Wave feel.

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Google has unveiled the Google Scholar Blog, "the official source for information about Google Scholar." The first post is about Google Scholar email alerts, very easy to set up with the handyt oolbar at the top of the Google Scholar search results page...

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Tony Judt writes in the NYRB about the U.S., and about American universities:

(excerpt)..By far the best thing about America is its universities. Not Harvard, Yale, e tutti quanti: though marvelous, they are not distinctively American—their roots reach across the ocean to Oxford, Heidelberg, and beyond. Nowhere else in the world, however, can boast such public universities. You drive for miles across a godforsaken midwestern scrubscape, pockmarked by billboards, Motel 6s, and a military parade of food chains, when—like some pedagogical mirage dreamed up by nineteenth-century English gentlemen—there appears…a library! And not just any library: at Bloomington, the University of Indiana boasts a 7.8-million-volume collection in more than nine hundred languages, housed in a magnificent double-towered mausoleum of Indiana limestone.A little over a hundred miles northwest across another empty cornscape there hoves into view the oasis of Champaign-Urbana: an unprepossessing college town housing a library of over ten million volumes. Even the smallest of these land grant universities—the University of Vermont at Burlington, or Wyoming’s isolated campus at Laramie—can boast collections, resources, facilities, and ambitions that most ancient European establishments can only envy.1The contrast between the university libraries of Indiana or Illinois and the undulating fields almost visible from their windows illustrates the astonishing scale and variety of the American inland empire: something you cannot hope to grasp from afar...

Monday, June 14, 2010

Nicholas Carr takes on Stephen Pinker's recent Mind over media NYT op-ed on the debate about whether Google is changing our brains. Pinker is of course a formidable foe and Carr goes to some lengths (ie. more than normal blog-post length) to refute his arguments. The most important of those concerns the brain's neuroplasticity; Pinker cites evolution and says Carr's argument is impossible, the brain being physiologically oblivious to technologies that have been around for a couple of decades, while Carr cites recent research on neuroplasticity that undermines such a view. I don't have the patience to read an entire blog post of this length right now (point to Carr!!), as other chores beckon (point to Pinker!!), but will return to it later. Pinker's position, incidentally, is also summed up in a bite-sized chunk adapted for the inernet-impaired brain here, in his response to the question edge.org's posed to 168 writers, "How is the internet changing the way you think" (Pinker's answer: "Not at all")

Cracked.com matches top 5 books with their psychotic fan bases (and then tells us why these warped fans have completely misunderstood the books...)
Lolita -fans are Japanese pedophiles
The Collector - serial killers
Horton Hears a Who - rabid pro-lifers
Catcher in the Rye - celebrity killers and various murderers
Lord of the Rings - neo-Nazis
again, this is courtesy of cracked.com, and not science.

Saturday, June 12, 2010

Michael Hirschorn writes interestingly and elegantly in The Atlantic about the transition from a free browser-based web to a paid-for apps-based media environment. Some nuggets:

Despite its Department of Defense origins, the matrixed, hyperlinked Internet was both cause and effect of the libertarian ethos of Silicon Valley. The open-source mentality, in theory if not always in practice, proved useful for the tech and Internet worlds.

But now, it seems, things are changing all over again. The shift of the digital frontier from the Web, where the browser ruled supreme, to the smart phone, where the app and the pricing plan now hold sway, signals a radical shift from openness to a degree of closed-ness that would have been remarkable even before 1995.”

On a more conceptual level, the move from the browser model to the app model (where content is more likely to be accessed via smartly curated “stores” like iTunes, Amazon, or Netflix) signals the first real taming of the Wild Digital West.

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Once again, Knowbodies eludes the judges of the Salem Library Blog Awards. Not only do I not get an award, I'm not even listed in that vulgar indiscriminate grab-bag of riff-raff known as the Salem Library Blog Directory. Perhaps next year; I've just sent an email alerting them to my presence.

Mike Wirth's winning entry in Sunlight Labs' Design for America competition. The entry won top honors in the "How A Bill Becomes a Law" category. Here are all 5 entries in this category, bundled together using the neat Krunchd.com service (check it out)